Yes You Can With These Simple Social Media Marketing Tips

Everybody is ready to try their hand with social media marketing. Mastering SMM can take a ton of work and time. Before you can get into the more detailed strategies, however, you must build a solid foundation of understanding.

Use lists as much as possible. People love lists because they are easy to read and easy to pass on to their friends. When you produce blogs or articles with lists, those who find the information you provide useful are more likely to pass the link onto others via Facebook, Twitter, or another social networking site.

Include a re-tweet option on every post to your blog. This will make it easy for visitors to share posts with their Twitter followers. It raises your potential audience dramatically.

Use Facebook to get some very low cost marketing opportunities. Make a professional business account or create a business fan page. Take some time to look up your competitors on Facebook to see how much of a presence they have, and what they did to get that. Do not copy what they did, but use their page as an example for what is working or what is not.

Be sure that your content is interesting and unique, so that other social media users will want to share it with others. People succeed by using social media, but only if their content sticks out from others. If you are out of ideas, you can always find inspiration online or from family and friends.

Find bloggers within your niche, and leave comments on their blogs. The great thing about comments is that you can usually leave a link with the comment, giving readers of that blog a way to find your site or blog. While sticking with blogs with bigger followings is more likely to generate more traffic for you, visitors from smaller blogs can add up as well.

Remember that when you are using social media to market your business, you are communicating with people, not at them. The technology that people are using now and the way social media is designed is allowing your customers to communicate easier than ever before. You have to engage in this conversation and communicate with your customers in contrast to posting ad copy with a one-sided point of view.

For large companies, social media marketing can be a labor intensive, complicated, and non-standardized task where efficiency can be elusive. Many ad agencies and social media agencies are still trying to understand how to effectively market to the masses and are making it up as they go. So be careful where you spend your money and make sure you are getting measurable results from your marketing campaign.

Have a reveal tab on your Facebook page: only your friends or followers will be able to see it. Encourage people to 'like' your page so they can have access to this unique content. You could for instance reveal a unique coupon code to the Facebook users who have 'liked' your page.

You can add applications such as SlideShare to LinkedIn. Try different applications and see which ones could be helpful to you. SlideShare allows you to create photo albums with detailed descriptions for each pictures. You could add pictures of your products or have your customers send you pictures of themselves using what they bought from you.

Contests are perhaps the most effective way to attract social media users, and a photography contest is no exception. Offer followers an appealing prize for the individual who submits the most entertaining and creative image featuring your products or logo. People will end up sharing pictures with you and others in their list of friends; those friends may not know you, and when they share the photo they give your company wider coverage in new markets.

When marketing your business on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, try to talk like a "person" rather than a "business". People who use these sites are looking for personal interaction. If you can incorporate some of that into your marketing campaign, you will have an edge. Personal conversation that is humble, collaborative, and two-way in nature works best.

Consider opening an account on the growing business oriented site LinkedIn. This site is designed for business professionals to communicate with one another and their customers. It has incredible features that include ways for satisfied customers to recommend you to others, increasing your reputation and credibility. You can also join conversations relevant to your business interests.

If you are looking to use Twitter as a social media marketing method, make sure that you choose a username that displays well and is easy to remember. This username should get the point of your company across, but should also be easy to remember. Don't choose usernames like TommyXo1009. No one will remember it and it is likely irrelevant to your company's name.

Don't worry too much about making your site perfect. While it is important to give the people a lot of information, don't let the fear of imperfection keep you from getting started. Just as in many things, you will need to learn a little as you go. Getting started is what is really important.

One great way to get people to participate in your social media sites is to offer freebies, giveaways, and contests. Make participation in some form or another on the entry form. You can use this to get people to follow you, like your page, or write something in a comment thread.

Find some influential bloggers that are out there in your niche and offer to be a guest poster on their blog. This would then allow you to have a link back to your blog. It may also attract people to follow you on the various social media sites that you are on.

You will certainly make mistakes with your social media marketing campaign but luckily, these mistakes are easy to correct. Social media is still in its infancy and, therefore, still morphing to suit people's needs. Learn about every tool you can use that will maximize your approach.